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we’re moving

tonite, we agreed to terms on an offer for a house. my family is moving.

we’ve had a few driving values in considering a move for a year or two:
– we’re tired of suburbia, and want to be in a somewhat more urban context that has more diversity.
– we want to be in walking distance of coffee shops, pubs, and other “village” community gathering spots.
– we haven’t been comfortable with our kids growing up assuming our suburban expansive home is the norm. we have felt convicted about the message that our home is teaching our children.

we’ve flirted with moving for more than a year, casually looking. but our looking mostly involved homes that were similar in price, due to the fact that moving to the cooler city neighborhoods in san diego means cutting our home size in half while keeping the same price.

but recently, with the cost of our kids’ private school tuition, we’ve realized that we’re living at the edge of our means. we rely all too much on my non-salary income (from speaking and writing). and that really doesn’t feel responsible, or even ethical.

so the new push to move has been driven by lowering our mortgage significantly (san diego housing prices are crazy, but i’m talking about lowering our house value by almost $300,000).

we listed our home, and were surprised that it sold in two weeks. that meant we had about 5 weeks to find a place to live. it was tortuous. we spent last week looking at almost 100 houses in the communities we were hoping for. but we couldn’t find the combo of house, neighborhood and price that met our values and desires. we expanded a little bit out of what we were initially hoping, in terms of geography, and found a house close to the village of la mesa. it’s still a suburb, but it’s 10 minutes west of us — halfway to san diego from where we were. this will cut the distance jeannie and the kids drive to school every day, and put us in a location where we can walk to coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, and a trolly stop.

the home is more than 1000 square feet smaller than our current home, but is lovely. it has everything we’d hoped for, and is in beautiful condition, including a great granny flat out back that we’ll use as a guest room and spiritual direction “office” for jeannie. the backyard isn’t grass, but all bamboo, plants and pathways — very peaceful and contemplative. we entered into a few days of offer and counter-offers, and landed on an agreement last night.

this is a theological issue for us, and a concrete result of our values.

i’m very excited. we’ll move at the end of august, so have a ton of work to do!

marko…
reading your reasoning & seeing how it lines up with many of the things you’ve blogged about on here before is very cool. thanks for working so hard at living with integrity…from the way you pursue relationships (and @ times reconciliation) with people to the place where you have your residence…it’s a challenging reminder for all of us in & out of vocational ministry. i’m pumped for your new house experiences…

What’s with everyone moving? LOL. Alot of the ole Mods from the YSforums moving too – me, Andy T, Matthew McNutt, Adam, Len has already moved. I even heard that Nameless Pastor Guy moved to a church in Ohio. Congrats. I’m still in the back and forth with a potential buyer of my home and move this weekend. So if you need any boxes? LOL.

I’m Mark Oestreicher

I'm a partner in The Youth Cartel, providing services and resources for individual youth workers and organizations. I’ve been married to Jeannie for 30 years, and have two great kids: Riley (22) and Max (18).
Here's The Youth Cartel's website.
twitter: @markosbeard
instagram: @whyismarko